That was the last school I was in, really, and that’s when I was twelve. Mother’s great collection takes her all sorts of places, so it takes me places too. In the years since the stone house, I have lived in four places in England and five places in France, plus one winter each in two different parts of Spain. Plus, there was the autumn we were in New York City when Mum was trying to start a gallery with the Metropolitan Museum, but that didn’t work because Mum said she doesn’t sleep well in New York, while she sleeps very well in Paris. So we went back. This was a mistake because the French don’t even like her. Or not the ones in charge. Do you know, she went and offered her collection to the Louvre? Or rather, asked them to house it if there was war, and if there was war, that she would leave them with some paintings at the war’s end? I saw the letter from the director, because Mum was so upset by it. Or rather, not upset, she was sort of off her head about it. She had Legrand paint some of the choicest lines on canvas and nail them around the house and then she had a party to celebrate what a foolish person the museum director was. “You will soon find you are propagating mediocrity; if not thrash . . .”
“Can’t even spell trash!” Mum went around singing. “Too good to spell trash!” And so we went on a mad tour around Europe stashing this and that in barns, but then Legrand got in her head about the mice and rotting so we went on another tour to get all the paintings and the sculptures back. Then Mum put them on the big boat along with our piano, and most of the degenerates responsible for that art. It’s true it really would be something if the boat should sink. Mother laughs sometimes and says if war comes and the boat gets shot, I should fix my sights on a woman with a solid fortune, because women are loyal and not hysterical with money, and they don’t get called to war. Neither Papa nor Stephan will be called to fight, that’s the good thing about having a Swiss passport. Not that they’d want Papa anyway. He’s terribly lethargic.
Anyway, I am probably never going to get married and I’ll either have a lot of children, or else I will have none. Maybe I will get married, though, and show my family a lovely, pretty time like we had in England. In any case (I don’t feel that I should write this!), I’m still a demoiselle!(!) Elisabeth got hers when we were leaving Hertfordshire. She pinned a rag into her undergarment and the pin popped through and stuck her during Mrs. Ruthlace’s cursive class. Her older sister brought her a mooncup back from London, which really made us laugh. Actually, “mooncup” is a good name for the stables, because all of those bright triangles look like they’re trying to catch something from the moon.
I bet I never get it. Mum said she never did. A miracle, she said, both me and Stephan, making it to life. Mum always says it’s nice to eat only a little so that you feel poetic, and I try to do this, but it makes me feel sad and it’s hard to get my words in the right order. I’m just silly when I’m hungry, silly to be around, is what I mean. And Elisabeth says you never get your monthlies if you don’t eat, that she got hers because she was always finishing my steak and kidney pie.
I go back and forth on it. Sometimes it’s true when I’m hungry I do get that poetic light feeling, and think I’d like to be married very much. But other times when I have my wits about me, I remember Papa making Mum lie down on the carpet so he could march across her belly when he’d had a horrid writing day. And Konrad and Mum have such a storm about them. But then I see the way he is with C. and I think how nice it would be to have someone to hold you and to tell all your secrets to, instead of you, small diary, who has no arms at all.
Some words for my mother:
headboard
the wires here for bats
the swimming area at the beach pond cordoned off with buoys
pink melon frappé
the ghost town of Pampino stories (which probably doesn’t exist)
awful marzipan
“the buying of the rains now”
a purple made from shellfish
her white long legs are my legs
lemon water (warm)
“How I despise myself”
the pink hole in her pillow
the painting of the gazelle
heavy leaves in England
the fire going out
also, lemon pulp (and bitters?)
her foot in ankle cast
the scorpion in orchid
¿
¿
the largest, biggest hat
One day, though, with the memories. All the flashes in one place. The time she took me out of school because she wanted to go driving and we drove up the English seaside looking for some ice cream, and we had the windows open and the ocean waves were fin-colored and the ice cream parlor was closed, and we walked to the cliff even in the wind there and she held me to her in the freezing, “Oh! My gorgeous girl!”
Miércoles?
It is almost dinner and I never did get lunch. Ferdinand went rock hunting and C. has her door shut and none of the artists know what to do with the strange things in the larders. Half the people here have never seen such fruit before, and in any case, most of the artists have made off with the oddest ones to paint them or smash them and draw things with their juice. There are already four pineapples and a dining chair floating in the pool.
I tried to find mother to ask if she couldn’t bring back the cook, as she said she might, and perhaps also the maid, but she is always talking fervently with Legrand in her green raincoat or standing at the bottom of the dirt driveway, waiting for news about her boat.
Some things for my brother:
If I had been born first, he would have been the same brother, still clever and impatient, but light enough to carry, like something I could steal. I remember when we walked our two dogs into the forest, how he was the one who picked up a green pinecone and then another pinecone and he put them at the opening of the second biggest tree and he said, “When those open, that will mean that we can go into the tree,” and I said, “What will we do there, won’t it be dark?” and other things that shame me now because my questions were so usual, and he said, “We’ll be safe,” and because he was older, I said, “Safe from what?” and then my dog, who was always the frightened one, started barking at the tree.
Viernes
The staff is back. No one knows their proper names so Mum calls the men “Eduardito” and the women “Rosa.” Mum says she sent them all back to Zapata for a couple of days; she told them to make it back for Friday, serves the artists right.
Hetty has a small book of Spanish phrases in case of an emergency. I asked her if I could see it, and I practiced most of the morning, and then I waited until everyone was outside of the house or working to use my sentence with the cook. “¿Dónde está Magda?”
“Pobrecita!” the cook said, and then she pulled out a wooden stool for me and had me sit and touched my back and cut up a papaya. It is really something thrilling, all of those dark seeds. She put them on a piece of parchment paper and spoke to me in Spanish, gesturing with her hands. She acted out what she wanted: she wanted me to go outside and dig and plant them, to make a papaya plant. I don’t know why but the idea of doing this made me want to cry. The idea of digging by myself, I guess, or whether or not I’d ever see what grew.
“Pobrecita,” she said again, rubbing my back and the hair she says is gold.
It’s only as I’m writing this that I realize she never told me where Magda went to, so maybe I didn’t say the sentence right.
Lunes
Jose Luis has been to town and he has news about the Führer. Hetty has let me borrow her Spanish phrase book as long as I don’t spill on it or drop it in the pool or in some other water, and it has to be back in her room each night in case one of the Mexicans tries to compromise her, she says. Regardless, I learned that the cook is named Maria and the houseman, Jose Luis. He goes to town on one of the ponies in the barn and comes back with flour and sugar and strange vegetables in the saddle sacks.
Jose Luis has a porter friend in Puerto Vallarta who helps people with t
heir luggage, and he says that the country of Japan has invaded China, according to one of the white men getting off a boat. “What was the nature of his business?” Walter wanted to know about the man in question, but Jose Luis couldn’t say.
There was much speculation then of what this meant and of where Japan and China were in respect to us in Mexico, and once a decision was reached, Hetty wanted to know if this meant that the waves would get even bigger at Teopa, but Baldomero refused to translate for her, saying that she was one of these people whose brain was an insult to her head. The only reason he agreed to talk to Jose Luis in the first place was to have news of the boat, but Jose Luis says that all the other white men are asking for news of the Führer, so that is what he brought back from Zapata, and Baldomero called him a silly man, and said next time to ask for detailed information about their boat, because that boat carried the future of art history and most of Jose Luis’s pay.
Lunes
For dinner all the girls were back in their embroidered dresses and we had fish on thick white plates. Baldomero had something you had to tug out of a seashell and mother wore her cloth-of-gold dress and all was right and lovely. Hetty had a stomachache and spent most of the meal silent, which made C. relax and be more generous than we’re used to. “But Hetty!” she said. “You’re such marvelous company when you’re ill!”
Mother had that lovely glow about her that she gets when she has spent time with Konrad, and Konrad was beautifully dressed and in a dashing mood. You see! He doesn’t always hate her. Most of the time, she is complimentary about his work, and she didn’t even mind the one where she has a horse head, because it was a startling painting and he’s fond of horses, he’s always said how much. She can be funny and quite clever, my little Mumma-Mum. Konrad can forget that because she spends so much time picking out dressing items and fussing with her mouth, but she’s really very witty, and when he remembers that, and sees other people admire her, we have the perfect nights. How lovely for it that we got one of those nights, now.
The news of Japan invading China has brightened everyone. No one knows anybody over there and only Legrand and Baldomero have been: they both agree that nothing matters unless the Japanese take Bali, which is a spiritual place where, they said, the castles look like Ferdinand’s rock castle in France. That is why Ferdinand is such a totem to them: he is able to go places mentally where he’s never even been.
There was also talk about a man named Jack. I don’t know him, but mother says I do, that I met him here last time. I wanted to argue that I would have remembered meeting a new person, but she was speaking kindly, and, in any case, I didn’t want to stick up for myself because the artists make loud noises when I blush.
Apparently Jack came in the 1920s, when all the art was in Vienna and Mumma met the Hollywood film man who told her about the place in Costalegre that he’d built. Mumma bought a house, she laughed, did they all remember that, she bought that pink casita without ever seeing it, over that odd beer. And she brought all of her friends with her to see the home she’d bought, and one of them was Jack. “Mr. Da-da-da,” Legrand hooted, and I will tell you that the way he laughed about it made me think that Legrand hadn’t been included in that trip.
Well, Jack came back to Mexico after the stock crash. The Viennese were writing out their grocery lists on banknotes, which seems awfully vulgar, so I don’t know if it was just the artists doing this or the regular people also, but the point was that Jack bought a house from the Hollywood man as well. This got everybody laughing, I guess about Jack’s house. “I will say that Mr. Hollywood saved the worst houses for the messieurs!” is what Legrand added, but I bet you, I just bet you, that it’s a perfectly fine house.
I don’t know how much time Jack spent here before that, but C. said that when the Führer put an end to modern painting, Jack moved to Costalegre permanently. “And stopped painting!” Legrand announced, a little happily, I’ll note. That was almost four years ago and no one has seen him since.
“We should send Eduardo out to see if he’s still here,” Mum said.
(I’ve told her his name is Jose Luis but she doesn’t mind it. She says it’s more romantic, Eduardito, and that he thinks so too.)
“He was so talented,” Mum said.
“Intolerable,” Legrand.
“He probably wouldn’t even want to see us,” said mother. “He didn’t care for us much, at the end.”
“You see,” said C., winking, “he really is a clever man.”
After that, I went up to bed to avoid another of their games, and also because I wanted to sleep with the idea that the evening had been pleasant. In the game they’ve played most lately, they force each other to look at someone else and then say something true. The idea is to do this with no clothing, so it will be true. I’m always worried one will stray and come up naked after on the stairs. Hetty’s always worried about the lovely Mexicans, while I’m worried about them. I asked Mum to build me a real door and she said that she’d ask Walter, but I don’t think she has.
My room is the most gorgeous place at night, even better than the stables because there aren’t so many flies. You look out and except for the moon and whatever’s reflecting in the ocean, it’s dark as dark can be. Sometimes I swear I can see the reflection of the moon in the slipping whales who slide in and out of the water that I’m never going to get to go into. Perhaps it’s just as well. Think of all the things that you’re sharing the sea with, and not only the whales. Mumma, when I was little, would tell me how Grandpapa dressed for dinner when he knew the ship was going down. How he put his mistress on a lifeboat and got on his tuxedo, or actually, he probably put the tuxedo on first because it was the mistress and some of the other survivors who said that there had been men awaiting death in style on the upper deck, and that one of them had been my grandfather. Mum has always been so proud of that, the fact that he went down in such a brave and elegant fashion. When I think of swimming underwater, I think of swimming through the shattered wineglasses and the twisting, slow cravats.
Day?
It is funny, when you have time for the remembering. I’m thinking of those dogs. Stephan’s was Sir Herbert. I don’t remember what I wanted mine to be; we’d been given them by neighbors. They were puppies, but it seemed like only a week that they were small, a week that was full of presents and much time spent in the house.
Mumma wanted me to name mine after her. “Go on and call it Leonora!” she told me, calling after it, trying to get my little dog to come.
Jueves
There is a new crisis. Hetty has started to go on walks with me to the stables and there is a situation with a goat. There is a small goat tied to one of the partitions where the horses stay. He’s got a clever air about him. But when you see only one goat, it’s always a bad sign. Hetty’s in a state about it; the fragility of animals causes her such pain. The goat is going to be killed, she says, and probably right there. We went back there with our phrase book: “¿A qui questa cabra?” I don’t think we got it right, but after much back-and-forth and hand signing, the groom said it was Señor Jack’s.
Hetty became red as she always does. “You tell the señor there’ll be no goats killed today!” And then she went to take the goat, and the man became very angry. Hetty told him she would see about this situation with Señor Jack himself, and she picked her way around the horse manure and untied the goat herself. The man protested greatly, but in Spanish, so Hetty said we had no choice but to leave his protests behind. It took us two hours to get the goat up to Occidente; he didn’t want to go. He kept standing stiff in place and bleating, no matter how we tugged the rope.
Once we got him up to the house, Hetty realized she didn’t know what goats eat, so she tied his rope close enough so that he could get to the garden, and we went in to get him a bowl of water, and when we came back, he’d knocked most of the lemons off a lemon tree. But there was shade and the grass that is so thick here, so he seemed all right.
Hetty marched
back into the house and called, “No one touch that goat!” Maria left the kitchen to see what Hetty was yelling about, and she got that expression she gets when anybody here talks to her, halfway between sadness and making fun of what was said.
Hetty said she was going upstairs to write a letter to Jack about why he was killing helpless animals, and have Eduardito deliver it straightaway, and how was she ever going to work on what she was supposed to be working on, when she had to take care of this? Didn’t anyone care about the emotional well-being of the animals and so forth. But she must have fallen asleep or started working on her novel because she was gone a long time. Legrand and Mum had started their cocktails round the pool when I went down to check the goat. And he was gone. His rope was too, which made me even sadder, picturing him trotting through the jungle with that blue rope trailing from his neck. The jungle is a horrid place with ticks and many burrs, and I knew it would get stuck on something, and that he would be frightened.
I knocked on Hetty’s door and she was, in fact, asleep. I told her that the goat had disappeared, along with the blue rope. She was furious, and said that if the rope was gone, then surely one of the Mexicans had marched him right back down to the butchers, and how was she going to get any work done when she had to be saving animals’ lives.
She told me to put on riding boots and half chaps against the thorns; we’d take a lantern, we would find him.
Well, we didn’t need a lantern and we didn’t need to go far. Beyond the lovely plantings there is a steep slope covered with all manner of pointy scrubs and furious cacti. The goat was about a ten-minute walk through this with his throat open. His blue rope snarled around a scrub of plants. The flies not even there yet.
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